Xandrios

Αναστολή λειτουργιών για Tripsta και Airtickets - Τι θα συμβεί με τα αεροπορικά εισιτήρια

«Κανόνι» στον τουρισμό: Λουκέτο ανακοίνωσε η Airtickets

The current state is that supposedly the existing tickets should remain valid...but I'm not sure that will keep being the case. They have 70M debt to airlines, and will need to keep paying those airlines in order to keep existing future tickets valid (OTA's pay airlines after travel). They have already fired (all?) 180 employees.

Personally I have a bunch of tickets with them. All Aegean flights. Anyone else affected?

KLouis

Somehow I remember a newspiece months ago reporting that the company was already in a dire financial situation. As I stopped getting junk mail from them, I thought they had already gone out of busines...

@Xandrios: The first three lines of your post shows as a series of question marks on my Mac. I guess this is a text in Greek encoded in a non-canonical way?

Xandrios

hmm, I missed that previous news then. Not that I have booked with them recently, but about half year ago they ran a mastercard-promo for 20-30 euro off each (one way) ticket. So I used that extensively to book one-way Aegean tickets, of which I still have a few unflown.

I edited the URL/links in my original post, does it look better now?

irishguy28

That's a shame. I used Tripsta (and its other guises) extensively. Not sure if I have any outstanding tickets with them...

irishguy28

That might be due to the GDPR that went into effect on May 25

DELLAS

Most people I know stopped using them back then . Hopefully for those who took the risk their credit card companies will come to the rescue.

Xandrios

Do us a favor next time and share such news here too; as I had no idea...I would probably have booked with them up till today as my previous experiences were quite good

KLouis

Judging from the number of spam I've been getting lately, I'd say that the effect of the GDPR was quite the opposite of what one would have expected...

KLouis

I hope there will be no need to!

Knobbgb

I have one A3 ticket booked through Airtickets.com Is this booking really at risk once it has been ticketed? The ticket is issued on A3 390 stock so surely it's now the responsibility of the airline and they shouldn't cancel that if they have a problem with their contract with the OTA. Or am I being naive? It's paid with Visa anyway so I should be covered. I'm more concerned about having to buy a much more expensive ticket nearer the time.

On a related note, I was VERY unhappy with AirTickets.com, despite having used them for nearly 10 years and this was to be my last booking anyway. They actually charged me a 15 Euro credit card fee which is now totally illegal. Yes - I know, I should have checked, but I was making the booking in a rush and on my phone and I guess I just got out of checking these things. Maybe that was a desperate attempt at a cash-grab to try to stay afloat? All my complaints have gone unheeded for the past three weeks so I guess this explains that too. Anyway, while very sorry for the staff, I'm glad they're going down if that's how they were behaving.

headingwest

Thanks for flagging this up, I had no idea that they were in financial trouble. I have 2 bookings (4 Aegean flights) with Airtickets, for next month. I always thought that once you paid the agent, they had to transfer the money in order for the airline to issue the ticket. It sounds like maybe that's not the case.

Tripsta used to offer some big discounts, so I'm not surprised they came unstuck!

headingwest

Short and sweet

https://en.about.aegeanair.com/media.../announcement/

Xandrios

I had one bad experience with airtickets.com as well; where I had bought Malev tickets through them and when Malev went bust they refused to refund the fare. In the end the credit card company solved the issue, but airtickets attitude was less than helpful. Besides that I used them many times without problems.

@headingwest: Well, that 400K does seem to contain a couple of tickets for various people here on this board...I would hate for those to get canceled. Especially for the reason Knobbgb mentioned, buying new tickets last minute will be expensive.

headingwest

Well my 4 flights costs a total of 62.37 EUR which should earn 4,235 status miles. These are (were?!) a significant chunk towards Gold requalification, so if this all does a horrible belly-flop, I've got to find something else to fill the gap. Regarding the actual journey home to the UK, which consisted of VIE-BRU-EDI (SN) connecting to EDI-ATH-LUX-ATH-LHR (A3), it might actually be easier to just book a cheapo Ryanair direct BTS-STN and the job's done!

Needless to say my 62.37 EUR out of the 400K probably wouldn't break the Aegean piggy bank if they left it as it was.

Knobbgb

The press release actually makes me feel more positive. After all, If Aegean are making public statements about their 'exposure' in this situation, doesn't that suggest that they expect to be losing some money over this (a rather small amount in the context of running an airline) - i.e. that the tickets would be honoured?

My tickets were also only 64 Euro, so no big deal really, other than the principle. I have until November to make other arrangements. I'm wondering if I should contact Aegean or just wait to see what happens.

Wow, mine only earn 1500. That's a great earning ratio - please do spill the beans...